Obama's NSA plans bring skepticism

President Barack Obama jumped into the surveillance debate Friday, promising a new slate of reforms, oversight and greater transparency for the snooping efforts revealed by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

The folks talking about these issues all along responded with a resounding “meh.”

“I thought we were beyond ‘I will work with Congress,’” said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. “What are you going to do with Congress?”

“It wasn’t clear to me whether he means to continue collecting all these records and put stricter oversight on their use or whether he’s open to constricting the collection in the first place,” said Michelle Richardson of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It seems like Obama has passed denial and is now into the bargaining phase, saying, ‘What if we make these tweaks?’…We need him to accept this is not going to stand.”

Some civil liberties advocates saw Obama’s effort as more spin than substance.

“From Edward Snowden to mass surveillance to drones, President Obama’s remarks seem more like a PR exercise in making the American public comfortable with the government’s policies than actually acknowledging the problems inherent in them,” said Zeke Johnson of Amnesty International.

Obama did speak in vague terms about backing “appropriate reforms” to the law used to authorize the most controversial data gathering: a program that gathers data on virtually every telephone call made in the U.S. and stores that information for five years.

“It didn’t get to the root issue: Is bulk collection acceptable?…And if people tell their elected representatives they don’t want it, what then? I thought he just sort of danced around the issue,” Aftergood said.

Even in the area of transparency and procedural reforms, Obama did not grapple with some of the most widely discussed proposals. He did not address suggestions that the telephone call data currently collected by the National Security Agency be stored instead by telephone companies.

And while unveiling a Justice Department document on the legal basis of the program and a seven-page NSA paper outlining its efforts, Obama did not announce release of any of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions that the programs’ critics and many lawmakers have been pressing for years to declassify.

Democrats in Congress were generally supportive of Obama’s comments, but also seemed to take note of the president’s omissions.

“Today’s announcement by the President that he is committed to making the intelligence community more transparent, as well as making changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Section 215 of the Patriot Act is an encouraging development,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) “For some time, I have been urging that the metadata program be restructured so that the data is held by the telecommunications companies rather than the government. I hope this is one of the reforms the president has in mind.”

“I will carefully examine the materials released today and will continue to press for greater transparency, including the release of significant FISA Court opinions about the Section 215 program,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).

Obama’s assertion that he had embarked — before Snowden’s leaks — on a process that would have led to a robust public discussion of the trade-offs involved in modern-day surveillance met with a mixture of amusement and annoyance.